


Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet

by inabathrobe



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Dark, Familial Abuse, Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-25 20:18:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inabathrobe/pseuds/inabathrobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan finds a bottle of hair dye in Adrian's medicine cabinet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though Your Sins Be As Scarlet

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Sophie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sophie), my beta, for saving me from myself on this.

"Shit, Adrian, I'm sorry," Dan says from where he is sitting on Adrian's couch, holding an ice pack to his shoulder.

"It's fine," Adrian says, "it's fine." He scrubs at the stain on the shirt, the acrid smell of hydrogen peroxide rising from the sink basin. Hydrogen peroxide smells like his childhood, Sunday afternoons after church with his mother. His father would go out then, playing cards with his men-friends. The stain on the shirt is more stubborn than any on the boy Adrian's trousers, the product of scraped knees, for which he was always scolded. Adrian turns the tap on, letting icy water run over cloth and skin until his hands are chilled to the bone. The blood won't come out.

There is a light touch on his shoulder and his name spoken softly. He turns to Dan. "You're bleeding." He takes a piece of toilet paper and delicately presses it under Adrian's nose.

Adrian winces.

Dan bites his lip. "Do you think it's—?"

"Yes." Adrian pulls his hands from the water and brushes Dan's away.

Dan turns off the faucet. "Oh, God." He is staring at Adrian in horror. He runs water over more toilet paper, which he uses to wash dried blood off Adrian's chin. "We should get you to a hospital."

Adrian waves away his ministrations. "It'll only need surgery. There's nothing they could do for it tonight. I'll take some Advil for the pain. I've had worse. Don't let it spoil the evening."

Dan stares at him. "We got mugged. I should say the evening is pretty well spoiled."

Adrian knows that there is nothing to be done. He turns his attention to the contents of his medicine cabinet: he must still have something for cleaning wounds. He wouldn't want Dan's to get infected. Nothing. "Let me dab some of this on your cut," he says, turning again to the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. The smell is sharp in the air, all the more potent when he reopens the bottle. When his father went out to play cards, he would lose more money than he earned, which had been enough before the trouble to see that his mother didn't have to do the laundry or care for Adrian herself.

"It's mostly bruise, not cut," Dan says, trying to stave off the cotton swab, doused in peroxide, that Adrian is threatening him with.

"You don't want it to get infected, do you?" He puts one hand on Dan's shoulder to stop him getting away. His grip is surprisingly strong.

"I don't want it to— Ow!" Dan hisses in pain.

"Is it as bad as that?"

Dan makes no answer, stiffening, gritting his teeth against the skin. Good. Adrian isn't going to put up with any fussing. He asks Dan if he should stop, just to hear him break down before him. Dan manages a reluctant no without sounding like he's in too much pain (it isn't much more than it would have been without the peroxide, Adrian knows). Adrian cleans the cut very gently; it's a good straight one, not ragged round the edges. It will be fine, given a few days. He can see the bruise blooming around it already, a deep sad purple. He regrets not seeing that man until it was too late.

"There."

Dan relaxes palpably. He smells, Adrian thinks, faintly of hydrogen peroxide and childhood loneliness. Dan reaches out and takes a bottle out of the open medicine cabinet. He looks it over. Adrian hopes it isn't the Betadine that he knows is in there somewhere.

"Is this hair dye?" Dan asks.

"For disguises when I was Ozymandias. It must be left over."

"It's blond hair dye."

"Oh."

"Adrian."

"What do you want me to say?"

"I want to know why the hell you dye your hair," Dan says incredulously.

Adrian is going to say that he dyes his hair because he always has, but instead, he finds himself unable to give Dan that simple truth. Dan won't believe him, and he doesn't want to see the look in Dan's eyes when he knows that Adrian is lying to him. It will only be worse because Adrian knows that it isn't a lie, though it may be a half-truth. Adrian wants to be able to give Dan a simple, easy answer, something that will make it all right. "Why does it matter?"

"Because apparently you've been lying to me for years about—"

"About my _hair color_. Dan, you and the rest of the world. Does it really matter?" Adrian snaps. He knows that it's the wrong thing to say the moment it is out of his mouth, but he can hardly take it back. "No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

"But you did." Adrian can hear in Dan's voice the tone that means they are going to quarrel. Adrian hates that more than anything because he can't always out-argue Dan and that bothers him. Even when he does, Dan doesn't take it the way that others do. Adrian is not persuasively faultless with him.

Adrian runs a hand through his long-tortured hair, made thin through thirty-some years of bleaching. He wonders how he could even begin to explain. He was very little when his mother began tinting his hair, making it lighter and lighter. She had told his father that his hair was finally going blond and hadn't she always said it would? She would dye it on Sundays when she already had the bleach out for laundry. The bleach went very quickly, and his father would scold him for staining his clothes while he was playing and tell him that he ought to apologize to my mother. And he did.

Dan reaches out, touches the mussed bits that have fallen into Adrian's eyes, rubs them against his fingers. Adrian shuts his eyes as though that will shut out the reality of it. He was so careful. So utterly careful. " _Why_?"

Adrian had apologized again and again but not for the scraped knees and the muddy trousers. He had apologized for his hair. He had been so, so profoundly sorry that he wasn't born blond. So he had dyed his hair every week until his father died.

And then they were free.

Adrian looked up from the bottle of hair dye clutched in Dan's hands. His knuckles are white against the dark bottle. He knew he should have peeled the label off. But who was going to go through his medicine cabinet?

She never said it, but they both knew that he had killed his father. Adrian knows that if he gives Dan much more time to think, he will be forced to tell him, and he cannot. He cannot possibly. Adrian cannot stop lying because it would drive him a little bit mad.

"Have I ever showed you a photo of my parents?" he asks, knowing that he hasn't. He only has one, a snapshot of them on a German beach. They are in bathing suits, and his mother is laughing. It is the only time, he thinks, that he has seen them happy together. He cannot remember his parents so mirthful at any point in his childhood.

"No," Dan says and goes quiet again. "I'd like to, though," he adds belatedly, perpetually Dan-awkward, just the other side of being at his ease. Adrian knows exactly where the photo is, and rummaging through the drawer of his bedside table, he produces it, faded, dusty, black and white. "They look so happy." Dan sounds surprised.

"They weren't. Not when I knew them."

Dan's eyes flicker from the photograph to Adrian's face, and Dan, forever the scientist, is working it out in his head. "Adrian, you know that it isn't necessarily certain— I mean, genetics are more complex than—"

"I know," Adrian says gently.

When Adrian broke his nose when he was seven, falling off a swing in the park, his governess burst out crying, thinking that she would never work again. His mother gave her a tidy sum and a good letter of reference and pretended to fire her. He read it on the blotter. It was above and beyond what the woman deserved, but Adrian was a little boy with dark hair and an odd nose in Nazi Germany whose mother didn't want anyone to know.

"You are being absurd." Dan's tone says that the subject is closed. The subject isn't closed. The subject will never be closed. Adrian will never really _know_.

When his mother was dying in a dirty hospital in Argentina, he asked why, all those years, they had dyed his hair in secret, and in her delirium, she said, " _Liebling_ , no one wants a Jewish bastard," and having confessed her greatest secret to him, she had died.

"But, I'm sorry, I haven't answered your question—"

"It's all right. I understand well enough—"

Adrian had considered looking, but he knows that he was born in 1939 in Berlin, and he knows that he does not deserve the truth. Adrian fingers his nose, eying it in the mirror. Dan sets the bottle back on the shelf. They are two men in a room. Nothing special has happened.

"We should go to the emergency room," Dan says.

Adrian does not protest then or when Dan throws the hair dye in the trash on their way out or when Dan pays for the cab or when Dan holds his hand in front of the young doctor at the hospital. Adrian must give up little things in order to keep this one sacred, profane thing secret. He touches his nose, and the stinging pain reminds him of scraped knees. He can still smell the peroxide on Dan when he crawls onto the thin hospital bed beside him in the wee hours as they wait for yet another doctor.

He whispers into Adrian's ear: "I like brunets."

Adrian laughs.

He can never tell Dan.


End file.
